What you dear readers write offers some of the most compelling reasons to not trust the nursing home industry. I thought my late mother had it bad, but your loved ones (and you as a family member of a nursing home resident) have also truly suffered! What follows is the heart-wrenching account involving a lady who passed away while a nursing home resident in Texas. A grieving daughter shares…

R.I.P. Dear Texas Lady

“I went to visit my mother on Sunday February 16, 2014. I was stopped by a nursing home employee who worked on the hallway where my lived. She told me that my mother was no longer there. At first I thought she meant they moved her to a different room. Then I was getting upset because I thought she had been sent to the hospital without myself or any of my siblings being notified. The employee informed me that my mother had passed away!

I am so hurt and angry! My brother (who had arrived by this time) asked a supervisor why we hadn’t been notified of our mother being sent to the hospital or even of her passing? His excuse was they did not have the correct contact information. This was not true at all since just one month before (in mid-January) my family had a meeting with the nursing home administrator and my mother’s doctor. During this meeting my phone number and the phone numbers of all of my brothers had been shared and verified. If nursing home staff would have looked through my mother’s chart they would have found my number (and the numbers of all of her other children)!

When we asked nursing home staff where our mother’s body had been taken and where we could find her belongings, we were told they could not tell us. They said her chart and belongings were locked up and we would have to wait until the next morning to even find out what hospital they sent my mother to!

What we found on our own, without the help of the nursing home staff, was that instead of sending out my mother to a hospital just a 15 minutes drive from the nursing home, they sent her to a hospital that was nearly a 40 minute drive. It turned out that our mother had been admitted to a hospital two weeks prior to discovering she had passed away! Two weeks and NO word from the nursing home about her need to be hospitalized! She passed away five hours after she was transferred from the nursing home to the hospital.

I will never get closure from this. I will never get to tell my mother goodbye. My mother died alone. My mother had family and children that loved and adored her. We need answers and justice.”

I’m sitting at my desk sobbing while I read what I just posted. If this doesn’t make you angry at the outrageous injustice that nursing homes in this country get away with regularly I don’t know what will! Texas, where this lady passed away, has a state law making it almost impossible to sue nursing homes. Several state legislatures are currently considering such heinous laws. Nursing homes mush be held accountable for their evil and laws to protect them from accountability should never see the light of day.